


Aa the bricht chaumers

by Lilliburlero



Category: 20th Century CE RPF, The 51st Highland Division's Farewell to Sicily (Song)
Genre: Doric, Gen, Homophobia, Post-World War II, Scotland, Scots Language, Scots Leid, Songfic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-08
Updated: 2015-06-08
Packaged: 2018-04-03 11:47:03
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,474
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4099810
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lilliburlero/pseuds/Lilliburlero
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A couple of years after saying farewell to Sicily, the puir bliddy swaddies are still wearie. But now they're cold as well.</p><p>*</p><p>to Grondfic's prompt, 'Pipie & Drummie, huddling for warmth.'</p><p>*</p><p>Advisory: homophobic language.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Aa the bricht chaumers

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Grondfic](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Grondfic/gifts).



> Essential listening: [The 51st Highland Division's Farewell to Sicily](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vfa8iEuDwe4), sung by Ewan MacColl.

Any claim The Grill might have had to salubriousness stopped about six inches below its elegantly and chastely moulded mid-Victorian ceiling. Scanty benches and inadequate, rickety tables discouraged conviviality over empty glasses, the bare walls were flyblown and nicotine-stained, the corners dusty and the floorboards scattered with cigarette ends. The electric lighting, dingy and yet somehow too bright, showed no-one’s looks to advantage through the dense mirk of smoke. That, of course, didn’t matter, or wasn’t supposed to: though old Innes had seen fit to emphasise general custom with a sign in the window reading _No Ladies Please_ , The Grill was not a venue in which masculine pulchritude could be noticed without inviting pugilism. That was all right too, Anderson considered, stamping slush from his shoes, because nor could it be observed, and his mate Grieg looked even worse than most, sagging pasty-faced over a pint of old and a dram. Anderson remembered him braw and confident at the dedication of the Sferro monument, drubbing his tenor drum, webbing beezed up to within an inch of its life, dazzling in sunlight so hard you could bounce off it.

‘Anderson, you dozy fucker. You came.’ 

He took the proffered hand and shook it warmly. ‘‘Course I did. No tae look at yir glaikit fisog. I’m going on tae ma mairit sister’s in Cruden Bay the morn’s morn. Eh, fit’s adae? I’ve seen men happier tae see the bailiff.’ 

‘Aye. I would be that.’ About to reply in savage kind, Anderson saw it had not been meant that way at all. ‘You didna get my wire?’ 

‘Wire? No―I stopped out wi―a’ Anderson substituted for _fabulous, unrepeatable bit of fauncy with his ain flat_ (except to throw drawers, a shirt, razor and toothbrush into a kitbag two evenings before, he hadn’t been back to his digs in four days) ‘―pal last night―and came straight up.’ 

‘Dinna fash. Fit y’haeing?’ 

They settled to reminiscence, which became with its customary inevitability a good old-fashioned Army grouse. After three or four, it began to seep out: Lola’s misery at separation from the sprawling family that in Sicily she had sworn would stifle her if she remained a day longer; her hatred of the cold, dark and wet; one poorly bairn and the other neglected for his sister’s ailments; twenty shillings of outgoings for every nineteen and six of income (John Innes’s till was swallowing more than its tithe, that wasn’t hard to guess). Anderson used to be the boozer of the two of them, he reflected, putting away carafes of rough red _vino_ as if it were this watery old and bitter. Eventually Grieg admitted it, addressing the barmat but nonetheless exciting the contemptuous sympathy of the snuffling hump of coarse frieze to his left: after a row that had simmered all last night, she had kicked him out. 

‘Christ, man, I’m sorry.’ The dread that had been gaining on Anderson, of a crabbit wifie, creased or puffy, and woken, bawling geets abruptly became a sanctuary, a haven― _whaur you will never win_ , supplied a tiny, unidentifiable voice fae lang syne. He bit back _faur the fuck’ll we sleep the nicht, you gype?_ in favour of doubles for both of them. There were men in town upon whom he could presume at virtually any other time of the year (though he quailed faintly at introducing to one another segments of his acquaintance that he had gone to some trouble to keep discrete) but three days before the New Year was another matter. They’d be from home themselves, or crammed in like sardines between aged mothers and nephews and nieces. It was too late for a bed in a doss-house, and a hotel was inconceivable. He would have to think quick; the barman had called time, and Innes begrudged his patrons even ten minutes of drinking-up. 

‘She’s had a wee bit while to caum doon, mebbe―’ 

Grieg shook his head. ‘It wasna that sortae quarrel. No one of her operatic arias. It was―final. Cruel and caud, ken fit aa'm on aboot?’ 

‘Aye.’ 

They sat drinking for some short time in silence, until the barman started making meaning gestures with a besom. Outside, it had begun to snow again. Union Street was stark and dour, the lights like blotches of split milk on the gaunt, towering buildings. 

‘Faur ye bidin’?’ 

‘Allan Street.’ That wasn’t too bad, Anderson thought. Schoolteachers and that stayed in Allan Street. Confirming that Grieg still had a latchkey, he proposed walking about for a couple of hours, then attempting to creep in and kip by the hearth once Lola had given up and smoored the fire, put out the lamps. Grieg looked uncertain. 

‘You got a better idea?’ 

‘Naw.’ 

But the weather soon put a tin hat on it, turning from light flurrying flakes to heavy drops of sleet. 

‘Come on,’ said Grieg, ‘I’ve a better idea efter aa.’ 

Grieg needed no light to negotiate his own backie, especially when stocious; Anderson, a deal more sober, tripped and skited, but managed not to land on his dowps. Tenement dwellers notice most things, but see too much to fret about them, and two drunken stumblers making their way to the washhouse, where bicycles and other machinery might be stowed as long as no inconvenience was caused, could in itself interest no-one. The boiler was out, but still residually warm: Grieg discovered some decaying rush matting and whipped a tarpaulin from a bicycle of the sit-up-and-beg class, and deposited these in the corner created by the coincidence of the boiler housing with the wall. He flicked off the electric light then, as attracting undue attention, and by the glimmer of Anderson’s lighter they curled themselves into the nook. Anderson, the taller, sat against the wall with his kitbag as a cushion, Grieg leaned on him, and they pulled the tarp up over them both. They would keep watch, they agreed, until one a.m., then Grieg would recce the flat in hopes of obtaining furtive ingress. 

It was miserable: the damp leached up from the floor through the mouldering mat and penetrated the walls; they sat with necks and thighs aching, struggling not to shiver as their extremities prickled and numbed and the drink wore off, leaving headaches. Their small store of cigarettes ran out; time crawled still more painfully. They spoke in undertones of Sicily, Sicily being mostly what they had in common; both marvelled that they had once squinted into that pitiless sun, felt sweat trickling down their spines and between their arse-cheeks, scrambled weak-limbed and dry-mouthed on scrubby hillsides and through olive groves, slept in shacks under grey skies that did not mitigate the heat, rather magnified it into a torturing, tangible cloud. That it had ever happened seemed incredible; they missed it; they did not miss it. 

‘―and d’you mind Henderson?’ 

‘That bliddy homo,’ Grieg slurred. Instinctively, Anderson’s face fell into a mildly amused neutrality, his limbs and torso minutely contained themselves. A body standing three inches from him would have seen and sensed nothing, but with their shoulders overlapping and knees touching Grieg felt it, and Anderson knew he’d felt it. Of course Grieg knew, and Anderson knew he knew; he’d even sometimes thought, wishfully, that the understanding might broaden beyond _nae questions and nae lies_ , though quite to what he could not imagine. 

‘He was a gyre-looking jeeger aaright,’ Anderson said evenly. 

‘Aa’m sorry. I didn’t mean―he tried it on, once. Ahin a kindae shebeen ayant Messina. Tried tae poke his tongue doon my thrapple.’ 

‘Aye, he did that to aabody. Quick dawk in the ribs would do for him, for aa he was gey big. Nae malice in him, like.’ 

‘Naw, but. Sorry.’ 

‘Fit wye, man,’ Anderson replied, not as a question. 

‘You’re aaright, like.’ Grieg wriggled and laid his head against Anderson’s shoulder. He shifted and tucked his arm around Grieg’s stout middle. He didn’t particularly want to do it, but it would be churlish to refuse such a clumsy earnest of trust. 

‘Aye, cheers,’ he said satirically, as camp as he dared. 

‘John Anderson, my jo,’ Grieg murmured sleepily, experimentally. Deeply embarrassed, though he knew it for a mere nonsense reflex, the way bairns babble rhymes, Anderson made a gentle joshing noise. He’d been about to say that the last time he'd been in Edinburgh he’d talked to a man in Sandy Bell’s, tall, handsome, domineering, more contemptuous of Henderson’s proclivities with a single curl of his lip than Grieg could be in the obscene vocabularies of two languages, who’d said Henderson had written a song about Sicily―about the 51st, about _them_. And another man had sung a few verses of it, in a quavering but tuneful voice. But somehow it was impossible to say that now. He couldn’t remember how the song went, anyway.

**Author's Note:**

> Anderson and Grieg are from Aberdeenshire and speak Doric, the dialect of Scots spoken in the North-East. A fun guide to simple Doric can be found [here](http://www.scotslanguage.com/Education/Written_resources/Doric_guide_uid3933). I'm not a native speaker of Scots and apologise for errors.
> 
> I have traduced [The Grill](http://www.thegrillaberdeen.co.uk/whisky.html) a little, though in the 'No Ladies Please' era I can't imagine it was much crack. It has a nice top shelf these days, though the seating arrangements are still not conducive to comfort.
> 
> I have it on reasonably good authority that I have not traduced Hamish Henderson, insofar as the discrimination and suavity of his seduction techniques are concerned. The handsome and contemptuous fellow at the end of the story is the poet Norman MacCaig, an enemy of Henderson's, who was not always above expressing his dislike in homophobic terms.


End file.
